Colin Eberhardt, technology director at Scott Logic and the first At-Large Member of the Symphony Software Foundation, isn’t shy about expressing his appreciation for open source. He spends many weekends and evenings on GitHub as an active member of the open source community, contributing to projects of various scales. With each project, he learned something new.
Governments, corporations and cybersecurity experts are still reeling after getting a taste of the most widespread ransomware attack to date. Only a few weekends ago, over 200,000 computers in 99 countries were hit by the unprecedented “Wanna” ransomware attack, also known as: WannaCry, WCry, WanaCrypt and WanaCrypt0r.
When we talk about the web, we think of tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter that have come to dominate the public web, or the latest breath-takingly valued startups, which are yet to turn a profit but are experiencing triple-digit growth. These companies have hundreds of millions of users and are household names around the globe. As a result of this success and the resources at their disposal, these ventures have made significant contributions to the technology of web development, giving developers excellent tools that are easy to learn, powerful to use and free.
Earlier this month, the Symphony Software Foundation conducted its first public hackathon of the year, in conjunction with Deutsche Bank Labs, Silicon Valley. As our first hackathon outside the major financial hubs of London and New York, I saw it as an opportunity to attract new types of participants and this was a great success - many of the participants had not previously used or heard of Symphony, and many of them did not come from a financial services or fintech background.
Jon Freedman, head of trading technology at Brevan Howard, was one of the earliest contributors to the Foundation. Along with leading the hubot-symphony project, which was the first project to achieve “active” status, he is one of the most active committers in the community. On top of all of this, we’re also happy to say that he is our latest at-large member.
As many of you will know, Symphony can run either in a browser or in a desktop client made up of the HTML5 Symphony application and the Minuet HTML5 desktop container.
Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Colin Eberhardt, technology director at Scott Logic and the first at-large member of the Symphony Software Foundation. I’ve been developing software for the financial services sector for the past ten years, and through working as a consultant, have had the pleasure of working with many different investment banks, brokers, asset managers and energy trading firms.
